


Directive Four

by bluemoodblue



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (but for a robot), But also plot, Found Family, Gen, Injury, Other, Slice of Life, Unexpected Friendship, dark matters does wild stuff with technology and technically this could happen, dark matters technology, here take my weird robot au, it comes complete with plot, i’ll be honest i have no idea how to tag this, probably not, season 3 speculation/au, that’s why it’s an au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:21:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoodblue/pseuds/bluemoodblue
Summary: The machine - because he knows better than to ask for a name, it would be silly to think he had anything more than a serial number - wonders if this is how thinking usually goes. It seems inefficient to keep asking himself questions instead of just knowing the answers, but maybe that’s just the way a mind works - one part to observe and ask, and another part to answer. He just woke up. He does not know how machines work.(His programming starts to answer, and he tells it to be quiet.)On a rescue mission for Juno, Rita picks up something else.Sometimes the Dark Matters tech we steal is the friend we make along the way.
Relationships: Aurinko Crime Family & Juno Steel, Aurinko Crime Family in general, Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel, Rita & Juno Steel
Comments: 24
Kudos: 111





	Directive Four

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if you guys remember, but there was an election recently. And while I was sitting around being stressed about this election I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be fun if I ran with this silly au idea I have. It’ll be a fun little thing to post to ease everyone’s stress! Just a little ficlet!
> 
> You may notice that it’s no longer election week, and this is no longer a ficlet. I may have lost control, for a little bit. I hope you enjoy it anyway!
> 
> (Also, a special thank you to Lex - the description of plush acquisition was inspired by [this post](https://lexicals.tumblr.com/post/620736777058123776/theyre-out-getting-supplies-shopping-trip-its)! You saved my fic from “oh god how do I write myself out of this hole with a character that doesn’t talk” - you’re the best!)

He thinks he might be cold, when he wakes up.

He pauses. "He"? That's a big assumption to make for a thing made up of metal and wires and circuitry, isn't it? So "it" then. Or maybe something else.

The assemblage of metal, wires, and circuitry casts back into its programming for an answer. The programming does not have one, because the programming does not care.

"He" then, because it feels correct and if it doesn't matter anyway, who has to know. He might be cold.

That much, the programming has an answer for. He can feel it running alongside him, pulling up calculations and conclusions based on collected data almost faster than he can keep up. He is a machine, and cold is meaningless unless it reaches a degree that would harm the machinery. He does not feel anything. He is correct, though, that the room is at a lower temperature than normal (there's a number to go along with that information with an alarming amount of precision and an unnecessary amount of digits); it is to keep the equipment from overheating.

The machine - because he knows better than to ask for a name, it would be silly to think he had anything more than a serial number - wonders if this is how thinking usually goes. It seems inefficient to keep asking himself questions instead of just knowing the answers, but maybe that's just the way a mind works - one part to observe and ask, and another part to answer. He just woke up. He does not know how machines work.

(His programming starts to answer, and he tells it to be quiet.)

The machine does not have to ask himself how to look, or to see - the processes of operating the body seem fairly automatic, and suddenly there is a room and many, many machines. They don't take any notice of him. And because observing is something the machine already knows it can do, it observes.

He can see in any direction, but only one direction at once; moving his eye too swiftly is disorienting, but more so for him than for the programming. He has legs, and more legs than he expected. They fit neatly underneath him until he wonders if he can stand, and then they unfold and lift, and he observes that he is both very small and very high up when he almost overbalances and falls off of the table he's standing on. Two of the legs - shorter than the rest and in front of him instead of underneath, so they must be for tasks - manage to hook onto a wire and keep him upright. He apologizes to the tall and stoic computer that he just grabbed onto; the sound that comes out of him is not what he expects, but he isn't sure what other sound he intended to make. The computer doesn't respond.

(His programming tells him that the computer cannot answer spoken commands and would not recognize his beeping as a command even if it could, and he tells it to be quiet.)

When he is stable again, and uneasily making his way across the table with too many legs that are all very spindly and end in points - _who thought this design was reasonable, he wonders, because if he is a machine someone must have created him and they have, in his very new opinion, a lot to answer for_ \- he catches his first glimpse of what he looks like in the reflection of a monitor. He has one eye, glowing a light blue and peeking out from a small dome set into the wider oval of his body. The fronts of his legs are covered in plates that are the same color as his body; if he were to enfold himself, he would look like a small, rounded chrome disk.

Unfolded, he looks like a crab.

Does he know what a crab is? No, he decides after a moment. But he knows he looks like one, and he isn’t sure how he feels about it - nothing, probably, because he's a machine and it's not something machines do.

(The programming pulls up a nature documentary stream of the life of a crab, and he tells it to _shut up_.)

It's very quiet in the room, just the soft hum of working computers for company, and at first he thinks he's alone. Something feels wrong about that; the machine may not know many things, but it knows most technology requires an "on" switch. If he was activated by anyone towards some purpose, they didn't stay to explain why and he doesn’t have any guesses.

He isn't the only one here, though - a careful scan of the room reveals something living. There is a human on a cot, hooked up to a number of machines, all of them diligently active but completely silent. The programming tells him that the vital signs of the human are normal, according to the readings. The machine doesn't know enough about humans to know if it's normal to be so still.

The machine would like a closer look, he thinks; any clues about the purpose of his existence seem like a worthwhile effort, and there must be a significance behind why they were both put in the same place. The human is halfway across the room, though, and while the cot is about the same height as the table he's not sure how to cross the considerable distance between them.

His descent to the floor is… not graceful. He tries to climb down the wire, but his grip isn’t good enough and his balance is much worse than it should be considering the precise calculations that the programming keeps throwing at him; he hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s meant to _do_ with all of that information. Finally, ignoring the alarm of the other half of his mind, he leaps from the table and tucks his legs and eye in before he makes impact.

Fortunately, the machine is made of stern stuff. He isn’t even dented.

He’s set his mind to the next task - climbing the cot, a monumental thing to ask of his tiny, wobbly limbs - when people come running in.

They aren’t supposed to be here, the machine thinks, and the programming agrees. Now would be a good time to raise an alarm, the programming thinks, and the machine disagrees. He can and does blame his hesitance on curiosity - in his defense, these new humans are extremely interesting.

(And perhaps, there is just a little bit of bitterness. If whoever he's supposed to raise alarms for wanted his unquestioning loyalty, they could have had the decency to be around when he woke up.)

The humans couldn’t look more different from each other if they’d made an effort. The first one is enormous, a great wall of a person, and the machine skitters out of the way before he’s stepped on while the human approaches the bed and starts removing wires and ripping off electrodes. The other human is very small, brightly colored, with a contained cloud of hair. Both humans look serious and, as far as he can tell, only have eyes for the cot.

The small one almost kicks the machine, and he beeps in protest. It’s enough noise to attract attention, and while the big human picks up the sleeping one to carry away, the small one looks down at him. The upset expression quirks into something just a little lighter. Delight, he thinks, and isn’t sure why he knows what to call it.

He doesn't feel anything, but there is _something_ different in his circuitry when he sees that tiny, fleeting smile. The programming does not offer an explanation.

When the human grabs him and puts him in her pocket, he doesn't fight it.

* * *

The programming is not happy when the machine wakes up again.

The machine's head, if it can be called that, is filled with every distress signal that its circuitry could possibly provide. If he was larger and created with the functionality for it, there would probably be flashing lights and loud sounds. There are those, in a manner of speaking, but they seem to be purely for the benefit of his internal workings, and the machine has the opportunity to wonder if he is capable of getting a headache. The programming reminds him that he was made for a reason, and he is committing the worst sin of any machine: not operating in the way he was designed to.

The machine uncharitably thinks that the one who designed him could have used improvement on several fronts, while the programming starts pulling rules from its depths.

Directive 1: Do not leave the ship.

Well, the machine observes - it is his best and only talent so far, in his very short life of several minutes - it would seem that he has failed Directive 1. His surroundings, covered on all surfaces by soft things which are, thankfully, so much easier to walk across with his spindly, pointy legs, could not be more different than the last room he was in.

Directive 2: Return to the ship.

Unlikely, he thinks through the alarms and flashing lights in his... in him. He's very small, and that's probably a long way to go. What's more, he doesn't want to.

Directive 3: Always follow directives.

Hm, the machine thinks, wobbling to the end of a much less intimidating fall with a pillow to catch him at the end of it. Directive 4: the machine does what it wants.

Incorrect, the programming insists.

Prove it, the machine answers.

The programming doesn’t have anything to say to that, and the machine might feel smug if feeling things was something he could do. He makes it to a large, closed door. There’s a keypad… on the wall, much higher than he could hope to reach even on fully-extended legs. He has no idea how else to open the door. In a moment of contrary stubbornness, he bangs on it. 

The programming asks him what he thinks he’s doing, but before he can answer, his strategy works. The door opens as the small human scrambles in and picks him up from the floor, hissing about making too much noise and what if someone finds out she snuck contraband out of a Dark Matters ship, huh?

So he’s contraband, and he’s from something called “Dark Matters” which is, unfortunately, a meaningless combination of words. There’s not a thing about it in the programming’s database - it feels as if the information should be there, but every report the programming runs pulls up blank spaces. Fortunately, the small human needs no reports, or prompting of any kind, to continue supplying information.

Her name is Rita. She’s scanned him, and tinkered with him, and given him a few fun additions - to make sure he’s not some kind of spy-bot, in her words, and he _could_ be upset about being poked into something different before he even got the chance to know what he was supposed to be, but he finds he trusts her. And when she mentions traps set in place to prevent him from contacting “HQ” the programming’s alarms shut right up, and he finds that he likes her, too.

“So what’s your name?” She’s smiling, eyes shining. She looks like she’s waiting for something monumental, and the machine is certain she is going to be disappointed. He can’t talk, for one thing.

He beeps uncertainly.

Rita frowns. “Somethin’ wrong with your voicebox? It’s brand-new, put it in myself yesterday. Why don’t you give it another try?”

That’s all very nice, but the machine doesn’t know how to _use_ a voicebox. The machine doesn’t know what a voicebox _is_. The programming doesn’t provide any answers; he suspects it would be laughing, if laughing was something a program could do.

The machine beeps again. Rita sighs. “Well, until you figure it out, I guess I can think of something to call you. Oh, what about spider-with-a-y, you know, _spy_ der because you’re a _super secret spy bot_ , maybe, and you kinda look like a spider with all those legs. Or, _or_ , maybe I could name you after a real spy - like from that one historic stream, that one with the drinking problem, oh what’s his name… BOD, you could be James Bod except it would be James Bot because you’re a _robot spy!_ ”

The machine isn’t sold. Rita finally settles on “Pancake.” The machine _really_ isn’t sold.

It’s okay, though, because Rita talks to him like he’s a person worth talking to and not a collection of parts without a purpose. He’s a convenient travel size, according to her, which means a lot of time spent stuffed in a pocket or bag while she carries him around the ship.

That’s where they are, a ship - a different ship, much smaller but evidently more filled with people than the last one, and they all have names. There’s Buddy, and Jet, and Vespa, and Juno who is always sleeping, and Ransom who the machine never sees anywhere. Even the ship has a name. Even the car _on_ the ship has a name. It makes the machine wonder what he would call himself, if the choice were up to him.

Something about the question feels like standing on the edge of the table again, but this time with a much longer drop and no certain landing.

She takes him on a tour of almost the whole ship while she talks. (It could be valuable information for Dark Matters, when they’re able to return, the programming considers. Because we’re very important to Dark Matters, is that it, the machine asks himself. The programming doesn’t answer.) She asks him questions, nods when he beeps ineffectually. She shows him streams and explains the plot faster than the episode can play. She offers him snacks.

It’s all useless motions. It’s all useless gestures. The machine cannot explain why the uselessness does not feel like it’s without purpose.

* * *

If the machine doesn’t take directives from the programming or Dark Matters, he doesn’t take directives from Rita, either. That is the justification he tells himself when he slips out of her pocket one day while she’s distracted. There are parts of the ship she won’t take him to, and he’s curious. Observation is his primary skill.

Vespa has him pinned before he can make it through the kitchen.

“What the hell is this thing,” she hisses, picking him up by a leg, and as he dangles uselessly in the air the machine considers the possibility that he can feel fear after all.

Rita rushes to his defense. “He ain’t doing anybody any harm! He’s not even a proper robot, not really, he can’t use half the things I added to him and he runs into things a lot and sometimes when he has to think about something too long he starts making this _whrrrr_ noise like he’s overheating or somethin’!”

Well. That’s a little hurtful. The truth, but still.

“And where, exactly, did you _get_ him,” Vespa grits out, and Rita winces.

Dark Matters is not a popular name on the Carte Blanche. There is a reason one of their humans was sleeping on one of the organization’s ships, and it’s not a shining endorsement for the kinds of things Dark Matters is willing to and capable of doing - he was caught by surprise, injured, and kidnapped. All of that would be plenty to make the machine nervous about his association with them, but worse is that Juno has not woken up yet, and no amount of scans or medical examinations have given them an answer why. They’d stopped talking about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still on everyone’s mind, Rita had told him. From the way she looked, he’d guessed it was on her mind most of the time.

Rita’s not very good at lying, especially when Vespa turns to dangle the machine over the garbage disposal chute. The whole truth comes spilling out in a flood of words, quickly enough that it takes Vespa a moment to understand what she’s hearing. When she does, she drops the machine.

It’s a lucky chance he’s had more practice using his legs; he just manages to hang on long enough for Rita to scoop him back out.

A family meeting is called, the first one the machine has seen in person, and it’s more intimidating than the machine would have expected from Rita’s descriptions and overhearing them from her bag. He’s the smallest thing in the room, placed squarely on the table between all of them while they stare down at him. He tucks in his legs and does his best to seem nonthreatening. 

“Rita, darling,” Buddy says after a long pause - and she sounds incredibly tired as she does. “Do you have _any_ idea what this little robot is meant to do? Any explanation at all would be… so helpful.”

The machine swivels its eye in time with everyone else to look at Rita. She doesn’t look very confident, and he can see the moment when she decides to fake it. “Um, of course Miss Captain Buddy! He’s, uh, he’s… a cleaning bot! Yeah!”

“We do not need a cleaning bot,” Jet says at the same time Vespa asks “What the hell is that thing supposed to clean?”

“Rita,” Buddy interjects before she can answer either of them, “Please tell me the truth. There have been enough lies in this family already.”

The machine turns to look at the captain. When he is no longer relying on just the tone of her voice, it’s clear that her exhaustion is something deeper than momentary exasperation at Rita’s decision. There is a weight to her features that hadn’t been

  
  


Buddy raises her one, visible eyebrow at him, and the machine realizes he’s been staring. He isn’t sure why. He’s lost track of the conversation somewhere.

(The programming quietly runs a diagnostic in the background: no identifiable system errors located.)

“Well?” Buddy asks at last, and there is a tension in the air that hadn’t been there before. “Are you going to show us what you can do and earn a place on this ship?”

The machine missed something important; he swivels to look at Rita, who looks back with clear expectation. In fact, everyone at the table has a similar look of anticipation, as if the machine is about to put on a show. It must have been Rita, who told them about his upgrades in an attempt to make him seem necessary. The machine is somewhere on a fine line between touched by her insistence that he stay and horribly certain he’s about to get himself thrown out under his own power. He doesn’t have to know what Rita said about him to know he can’t deliver - he doesn’t know the first thing about being a machine.

A little pathetic, seeing as how that’s the only thing he is.

He beeps. It sounds as uncertain as he feels. Buddy hums.

“At least a useless robot can’t spy on us,” she says, turning away from the table before she’s finished speaking. The machine is sure he has failed some kind of test; he is sure he has disappointed, and there’s something thrumming through his wires that isn’t soothed by the understanding that he will not be thrown away even if he deserves to be. “You can keep him, Rita - just keep an eye on him, will you? No more traitors on my ship, thank you.”

She leaves. Rita’s celebration is drowned out by another question the machine’s programming has no answer for - why build a useless thing?

* * *

In time, the machine collects a number of names. Jet calls him Hubcap, and Buddy shortens that to Cap. Vespa mostly calls him _get that piece of junk out from under my feet or I swear I’m gonna launch it out of the airlock_ and similar, equally creative choices.

He waits for one of the names to click, to identify him in a way that he hasn't been able to for himself, and they never do. They're just sounds. He takes them for what they are - acknowledgement of his presence, a way to communicate with or about him without confusion. Isn't that all that names are, anyway? These are... functional.

If the machine has a preference, though, if he's allowed to place one meaningless sound above the others, he thinks he likes the name the thief gives him best.

The thief's name is Ransom. No one has to tell him so - it's one of those things he picks up from passing conversation, not entirely sure it's something he's supposed to know or if the inhabitants of the room just forgot he's there. It's strange to call him a thief when the machine is almost sure that everyone on the ship _is_ (they stole back Juno and they stole him, after all, and he observes the kinds of plans they make around the kitchen table), but this Ransom must have done something worse. He's kept in the belly of the ship, locked away, and even the machine - Dark Matters make and all - hadn't earned that level of mistrust.

Maybe observation isn't so much a talent as it is a weakness, because the machine wants to _see_. It could be a very bad idea, he admits as he slowly, carefully hops his way down the metal stairs to the brig. No doubt this person is dangerous, and it could take days for any of the crew to realize he’s missing and start to look for him. Assuming that they look for him, and don’t just shrug off the loss.

(It can’t be loneliness he’s feeling, the programming reminds him, because machines don’t feel.)

(Yes, he reminds the programming, he knows - they’re the same thing. If he _could_ feel, he’s sure the feeling would be annoyance.)

It’s definitely not a _good_ idea, and it’s not logic or directive that drives him. There’s a sort of perverse sense of wanting to know everything, whether it’s allowed or not. Maybe that comes from his programming - a little hint of his original purpose, to uncover information people didn’t want him to know. There’s no way to know for sure; if his programming can’t tell him if he’s right, it’s anyone’s guess.

The thief isn’t what he expects. In fairness, his expectations had mostly amounted to “wildly dangerous” if the thief required caging, but the man in the brig has a very similar look of _unbearably tired_ as Buddy. He might be tall if he stood, but he isn’t; even though it’s late, he isn’t sleeping either. He’s curled up on the bed braced against the wall, like he’s in pain and clutching the wound.

Distracted from his careful descent, the machine misses a step and goes clanking down the remaining steps in a cacophonous, ungraceful mess. He has the presence of mind to tuck in his legs and his eye, which sends him rolling like a coin. Finally, he rolls himself out on the ground floor in front of the bars of the cell. Mortifyingly, he stretches his legs only to realize he’s upside-down.

The machine is frantically trying to push himself upright through a combination of opening his eye very wide and scrambling for purchase with his legs, when he hears something...

Something good. Something that catches his attention like a tiny, startling spark.

Ransom is laughing. It’s a soft sound, and not very happy - it sounds like it’s being torn out of him, which has to hurt. But it’s laughter, and something about hearing it makes the embarrassment of falling down the stairs as a first impression a little more acceptable. It doesn’t make sense, but there’s a lot that doesn’t make sense; his programming is probably scrambled.

(The programming huffs.)

By the time the machine rights himself, Ransom has unfolded from the cot to stand by the bars. He _is_ tall after all, but he’s not very intimidating; it might be something about his posture, which still seems slumped and weighted. There’s just a hint of a small smile on his face. “No one told me we picked up a stray,” he says. “What brings you all the way down here?”

The machine can’t answer, of course, but Ransom doesn’t seem put off by the beeping. He’s a lot like Rita in that way, taking the machine’s limitations in stride. All he really seems to need is someone to talk to. 

And he does talk. In time, when it becomes clear that the nighttime visits will continue, he waits by the bars of his cell, looking expectantly at the stairs. Ransom is very good at telling a story, and if the machine isn’t sure which are true and which are made up just for something to say, well, does it really matter? The machine has no one to tell. It feels like a purpose, when he realizes Ransom smiles more often - like he’s accomplished something only he could, in these circumstances. Maybe that’s enough of a reason to keep returning. 

“I don’t have anything to call you.” Ransom had finished a story, and the thought comes unexpectedly out of the silence. The machine beeps, a little series of tones that almost create a tune. Ransom whistles it back, more musical than anything the machine can manage. He chuckles. “That’s something - but not really a name, is it?” 

He looks down at the machine for a while, and the machine stills, anticipating one more chance for meaning.

“You look a little like a frisbee.”

The resulting series of beeps are clearly interpreted as the rant they’re meant to be, and Ransom is laughing hard enough that there are tears in his eyes. The machine stands, makes an obvious show of clicking over to the long task that is climbing the stairs.

“No no, don’t go, please.” Ransom is still trying to hold in his laughter, smiling widely and sunk down to the floor to reach out between the bars and beckon the machine back. There are only two people in the whole world who want a silly, clumsy, wayward machine, and he can’t walk away from either of them. He sighs in a _whrrr_ and clinks back, dropping himself against the bars with a satisfying amount of noise to properly covey his annoyance. Ransom has to stifle another laugh.

“...maybe just ‘Bee,’” he says eventually. He isn’t looking at the machine anymore, but the far end of his cell - and from the distant look on his face, even farther than that. “It reminds me of a story.”

It’s the first night he tells the machine about Juno. Juno, covered in sunshine, strong and sharp and still perfectly flawed enough to come up with a silly excuse about a long-gone creature to cover their tracks. It’s all truth; it couldn’t be anything else, with the way Ransom sounds while he’s telling it - rubbed raw and still fond like the pain is worth it. This story is important in a way the others weren’t.

The machine calls himself “Bee.” There’s something just next to right about it.

* * *

If Bee does not have a purpose, he will create one. 

If Bee does not feel like he has a real place aboard the Carte Blanche - he will _create_ one.

The programming has all but given up on a return to Dark Matters. There are no more alarms in the morning, no more chastising about directives, no more sneaky, unwanted thoughts of escape and sabotage when Bee notes the inner workings of the ship or overhears plans. The programming is quiet - pensive, even, if Bee feels confident enough to start assigning unfitting, human terms to machinery. If Bee didn't know better, he might even think the programming is following his lead and putting itself to the task of observation. It's a silly thought, since he _is_ the programming and the programming is him, but he indulges himself in a lot of silly thoughts. Life doesn't put itself together in the easy assemblage of parts that the other half of Bee's mind would prefer; to make the pieces fit at all requires a creative sort of reinterpretation that isn't always logical or predictable.

Bee's purpose on the ship, for example - there were undoubtedly many mechanical, machine-like contributions the little robot could make to the crew's life, if Rita was to be believed. Every morning brought with it another series of tests - did he think he could talk now? Has he tried his comms attachment? Did he access the incredibly devastating viruses she'd uploaded in case he needed to crash an enemy ship in an emergency? (He's still stuck with beeping, he tried but he was still only picking up the number of an incredibly confused man on Mars, and maybe but the programming had wrapped them in several walls of access protocols and done the technological equivalent of slapping his hand away when he'd tried to poke at them.) If he could make any of them work, Rita would happily stuff him with so many functions he would be indispensable to the crew in a week.

He tries, but whatever essential part of him is broken, or incomplete, or whatever, stubbornly stays that way. He can't be what he isn't, and he can't linger on the loss; if he's going to make himself useful, he'll have to rearrange the pieces.

Bee is good at observation. He plays to his strengths.

It starts small, with a burnt-out light in the hall that no one has noticed yet. Bee parks himself underneath it and beeps every time someone walks by. He's mostly ignored, or absently nodded to, and the entire experience is gratingly annoying when there are plenty of interesting things happening elsewhere that he could be watching. Bee remains firm in his resolve; this is the test run on which the entire experiment hinges. If he is persistent enough, will the crew understand that he's trying to communicate something to them?

It takes Jet nearly stepping on him, and a lot of sudden, frantic beeping, before he gets anywhere close to his ultimate goal. Jet stops, startled, and apologizes - which is kind of him, seeing as how Bee is making something of an inconvenience of himself by standing right in the middle of the hallway. Jet moves to pick him up, asking if he needs help getting somewhere, and Bee takes a step back. Still beeping, he looks up significantly. Then at Jet, then up again. He waves his arms a bit for good measure.

Jet, who frequently has the kind of straight-line logic that is the envy of the machine's programming, gets the picture. "I see. You have a maintenance concern. Thank you for telling me, Hubcap." It's the matter of a moment for Jet to remove the light cover and reconnect a couple of wires, and the effort of half of Bee's day is done. 

Jet did the actual work - the task had remained as much outside Bee's grasp as anything else. But the light is shining now, and it hadn't been before, and that's... Well. A start, if nothing else.

Bee tries more little things. Another light outage, a strange blinking on the temperature gauge, a shortage of Rita's snacks just before a planet-side grocery run. It takes time, it takes work and a lot of waiting and a lot of _insisting_ , but eventually Bee's beeping is noticed. His strange, ineffective form of communication is enough to earn the active attention of the crew, enough to turn heads. It's understood that he has something to say, and eventually, he's deemed worth listening to.

Bee attempts bigger tasks.

He goes to fetch a tool for Jet. He's sent crawling under a piece of furniture after an important piece of stray paper. He beeps at Buddy's door until she chuckles and takes a break from her schematics and plans. He returns a stray knife to Vespa's room after she demonstrates her throwing ability on a piece of toast. He puts Rita's comms charging when she forgets to. He attempts to carry a book down to the brig, gives up in frustration, and sends it tumbling down the stairs in front of him while Ransom laughs in surprise. And something slowly shifts. Something changes, and he's not sure if the bigger change is the way the humans look at him or the way he looks at them.

Somewhere, they stop being tasks, or directives, or a purpose. They lose the definition of some end goal - they are just the things Bee does. As part of life on the Carte Blanche, he adds quietly, though of course there are no secrets in Bee's head. 

(You're too attached, the programming warns. Without a functional purpose, you are...)

(What, Bee wants to know.)

(The programming doesn't have an answer.)

Rita has nightmares sometimes. Bee has grown accustomed to the way her breath hitches and her sleep becomes uneasy, her unusual quiet in the morning until she can shake off the unease. He wants to fix it for her and he knows it's beyond his programming - his programming knows it too - so instead he thinks of a stream they watched not so long ago, where singing helped someone's sleep. He's not good at singing, but he warbles out the closest approximation of a melody he can manage. It seems to help. 

When it doesn't, when Rita sits up at night with an unusually uncertain look on her face from her nest of pillows, sometimes she reaches for him. It's hard to say why, when there are plushes that are closer and better for hugging - no comparison to his hard, outer shell - but he lets her. Bee doesn't think he's ever been afraid of Rita, doesn't think he ever will be, even though she has the technical understanding to tear him to pieces.

Sometimes she'll put on a stream, and Bee will try to hum the theme song to make her laugh. Sometimes she'll talk, the way he thinks she might have talked to someone else once, and he does his best to understand.

Jet should be threatening. He is, in a way, just by being so very large; not a thing he can help, but there's just so much of him and so little of Bee. It's Ruby, eventually, who convinces Bee to give him a chance - Ruby's a reasonable machine, trusts Jet the way Bee trusts Rita, and says something that feels very significant about pilots and communication that Bee is pretty sure flew right over his head. So the next time Jet goes out to the garage, Bee makes a point of following him. And staying. Staying at a _distance_ , but staying.

"You may come closer," Jet says eventually, and it takes a moment to realize he's talking to Bee and not Ruby. "I will not cause you harm."

Jet is deliberate, about everything. He is also brutally honest, which could be wounding but is instead a bit of a relief - Bee can follow a logic that direct, and so can the programming. After a while, it becomes easy to fool himself into thinking Jet can actually understand him - he's right more than he's wrong, and he's increasingly right the more often they "talk." Bee is sure that Jet is just humoring him until the first time he's picked up and carried along as Jet walks off to do something else, so that they can keep talking. When he catches the hint of a smile, or what seems suspiciously like a joke, he wonders which of them is getting more out of their conversations; he thinks it might even be an even exchange.

_Beep_ , Bee beeps from Jet's shoulder - it had been a task all its own, learning to trust Jet enough to be placed on his shoulder without fear of falling. The first time, all he'd been able to do was cling to the fabric Jet's shirt and try not to look at how far away the ground was and how it would probably take him a full minute to get there. (The programming had said something uncharitable about Bee's depth perception and grasp of time. Bee had asked if the programming could define "hyperbole.")

"I am adding enough salt."

_Beep_.

"You may express your opinion if you wish. That does not mean it is correct, or that I will listen to it."

_Beee beep_.

"I do not take cooking advice from beings who do not possess a mouth or tastebuds."

_Beep!_

"That language is inappropriate. I do not know where you heard such a thing, but please refrain from repeating it."

(It would do no good to tell Jet he'd learned it from Ruby.)

When Rita reaches for the saltshaker at the table after her first bite of dinner and Bee trills in victory, Jet is a good sport about it.

Vespa definitely means him harm. Vespa absolutely, repeatedly, means direct harm to Bee specifically as soon as he gives her an excuse to cause it, and Bee is always aware and always avoiding her. It helps that Dark Matters hasn't descended in the time since he's boarded the ship; the fire leaks out of her threats a little more with every passing day and the increasing unlikeliness that the small machine plans to betray them.

When Vespa finally does make good on her threat to kick him, it's entirely by accident. She's in a hurry, he's in the way, and he's flying along the corridor at high speed before he's even realized what happened.

There's a muttered "oh _shit_ " behind him somewhere, but Bee is preoccupied with tucking his legs in and bracing for impact. He skips across the metal floor like a stone over water, but this time with more loud, jarring clangs as he hits the floor and Vespa's footsteps follow him just a little too slowly to stop his progress. The Carte Blanche is a disorienting blur of color around him, when he manages to peek. It's the fastest he's been since... well, since ever - until he crashes unceremoniously into a wall.

Bee peeks up. Vespa is standing in front of him, her usual scowl warped with something that might be close to real concern. She's about to say something - maybe an apology, maybe an insult that's as close as she can _get_ to an apology - when Bee lifts his arms and beeps urgently.

_Toss me_ he tries to convey, and from Vespa's wicked smile, the sentiment comes across perfectly. 

He's so much faster when he's flung like a frisbee. The rest of the crew eventually learns to duck at the sound of rapid incoming beeping and Vespa's delighted laughter, lest they make contact with a speeding silver disk. It only takes a few hits and subsequent bruises for them to realize they _really do not_ want to get in the way. After an alarming number of slams against distant walls and furniture, Bee even learns to hang on, utilizing those sharp, pointed legs to puncture and cling.

"Try not to poke holes in my ship, if you would," Buddy says as she passes, but she's smiling.

Maybe it's a risk to approach Vespa when she freezes up - caught up in the pressing need to determine what's real and what isn't - but maybe getting tossed around has made Bee a little braver. (Or knocked some of his wiring loose, the programming adds, and Bee doesn't argue the possibility.) Usually, he'd click quietly through the room while she's paused in whatever she was doing, trying to stay below her attention and out of her line of sight. Today, out of bravery or stupidity or some other thing, he clicks up next to her. No movement. He tucks his legs in below him, quietly. No movement. He makes a very big show of scanning the room - a general sort of scan that looks much more impressive than it really had a right to, since the bright, laser lights tracing the room back and forth are just a physical demonstration of the invisible scans that allow him to see - and when he's done, he makes two low beeps. Negative, for whatever that's worth. "And how do I know _you're_ real," Vespa mutters, but her tone is more amused than threatening. Bee thinks about it and makes the same _ding_ that the microwave does, and Vespa laughs a hoarse, rasping sound.

Buddy never seems to need much from Bee. She's always thinking of something else, and he slips below her notice almost by accident as a result - just not enough trouble to hold the attention of an already-busy mind. It's not meant to be cruel, Bee knows; Buddy drifts in and out of the medbay, in and out of her room and it's abundance of schematics, plans, notes, as if the solution is already in front of her if she could just find it. Bee thinks the best thing he can do for her is to stay out of her way, but every once in a while he's presented an opportunity. Returning a misplaced schematic to her desk, or trilling from the door to remind her of the time when the family meeting has already started. When he finds her falling asleep at her desk and brings her a blanket - mostly dragging it along the ground behind him because it came unfolded somewhere during transport and he didn't have a hope of fixing that - she smiles at him. "You really are trying your best, aren't you?" The question might have been directed at him, or it might have been a private observation; Bee beeps in confirmation anyway. "Well, thank you, Cap. You are a marvel, do you know that?" Bee's just a machine with a lot of parts that don't work; Buddy must have been more tired than either of them realized.

Sometimes, Bee sits with Juno.

Sitting in the medbay next to a sleeping human is not a productive use of his time, but it would seem strange to ignore him. Juno isn't a piece of furniture in storage, after all - he's a person, a part of this crew that maybe Bee would know a little better if circumstances were different. He wonders what Juno would be doing, if he was awake. He wonders what he would think of Bee, if they'd be getting along by now. He beeps agreeably to the rotation of people who wander by in the course of a regular day - all of the faces that have grown familiar to him, with less confusion and surprise the more they find him there. All but one.

Ransom is almost never out of his cell. He gets to leave to shower, but meals, sleeping, the long, empty hours of the day - those are all spent alone in the deepest part of the ship. Ransom is always happy to see him, but that's not much to look forward to. He must have done something awful, Bee thinks. There must be a reason he's there, because Bee _knows_ the crew and they aren't cruel people. But Bee remembers the way Juno's name sounded, said in the dark like a wonderful secret, and he wants to believe that he understands what that means. 

If Bee could ask Juno who he'd like to see by his bed, he wonders what Juno would say.

(You can't know that, the programming tells him.)

(If you do something stupid you could wreck everything, the programming tells him. Or maybe it isn't the programming, this time. Maybe Bee would just prefer to hear it from someone else.)

The ability to do something stupid requires the ability to _do something_ , and the possibility of a feeling that might exist is far too complicated and uncertain for him to act upon. He's no expert in feelings, anyway, and he doesn't have enough words to ask enough questions to be _sure_. Instead, he decides to do something a little less stupid - he breaks into Juno's room.

It's hard to call it a break-in when the door isn't even locked, but it does feel sneaky. He supposes the thief crew has finally been a negative influence, and this could be just the start of his life of crime. Pretty simple for a first heist, and he's not even sure what he's looking for until he spots it: a plush sitting on the unused bed, of some creature that does not look comforting but does look exceptionally soft. In Bee's experience, next to small, pancake-shaped robots, plushes are the best thing to reach for during uneasy sleep.

Climbing the bed is an expedition made only slightly easier by Bee's experience with clinging to clothes and walls. The bedsheets are in rough shape by the time he makes it to the top of the mattress, but at least no one is using them for now; by the time they realize, it will be later-Bee's problem. The plush is even bigger up close, larger than Bee by quite a bit, and he does the machinery equivalent of sighing. A little _whrrrr_ noise emanates from him by habit, and he hauls the plush onto his back.

If anyone had been around to look, they might have noticed a largish, inanimate Martian rabbit wandering the halls of the Carte Blanche. It's progress is slow, with the creature dragging its feet and getting its soft tusks caught on corners, but eventually it finds its way to the medbay and the only occupied bed.

Bee looks up at the bed. He could climb it, maybe. The large bunny definitely could not.

He is on his third valiant attempt to fling the mass of plush and fabric onto the bed from the floor when Rita catches him. His reaction is somewhere between "ask Rita for help" and "hide the criminal activity" and ends up with him frozen in place. The plush bounces off the bed and lands directly on top of him.

Rita comes to his rescue again. She lifts the plush off of him and takes a long look at it. "I recognize this," she says finally; her tone is even, but her smile is a little shaky. "There was this fair, one time when we had a few days to stay planetside - don't remember where, we’ve been so many places now. Mista Steel tried to win it fair and square, but the game was rigged. He was real disappointed, too, but he didn't like showing it when he thought the reason was silly so he acted like it wasn't a big deal. But Mista Steel, he always liked those rabbits, and if he misses anything from home I bet it's them." She sits down; she's looking so intently at the plush that Bee isn't sure she remembers he's there. "It was Mista Ransom that got this for him. I dunno if you met him - he's down in the brig now, after... after everything. Anyway, back then he used to love makin' Mista Steel smile - sure seemed that way to me, at least. And he's a real good thief, so he stole it and brought it back here. Usually Mista Steel hates him stealin' stuff for him like that, but he always kept this."

There's a long silence that it doesn't feel right to interrupt. Finally, resolutely, she places the plush on the bed next to Juno.

"He'd want it." Rita looks down at Bee after a second, eyes misty in a way he wishes he could fix and he knows is so far beyond anything he can help. "Were you trying to tell me something, bringing it here?"

Bee doesn't think so. He doesn't know how he could, when he only learned the significance a few minutes ago.

But somehow he's managed to say something big and complicated with a small gesture, so who knows?

* * *

If Bee is already a criminal anyway, he's happy to be Rita's partner in crime. And jailbreak, no matter how temporary, is definitely a crime.

"It's just, what if he'd _want_ to see him," she justified while the plans were still a _maybe_ that she could walk away from. "I mean, I can't just go up to him and say 'Mista Steel I been thinkin, and I don't know what exactly happened with you and Mista Ransom when everything went wrong because there was a whole lot of _everything_ happening just then, but maybe you'd actually like to hear what he has to say' because nobody can wake him up even though nothin's _wrong_ with him." Juno had gotten another clean bill of health just that morning, from a Vespa who looked down at him with an almost-murderous expression as though she could yell at him to get out of bed. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Juno Steel, and Juno Steel hadn't stirred since he was dragged away from the ship - those were immutable and coexisting facts.

"What if it's like the streams," Rita continued with minimal input from Bee, a setup that worked well for both of them. "What if that's what Mista Steel's _waitin’_ on, you know? He pretends he doesn’t like all of that romantic stuff, but I’ve known him too long for that - he gets all teary, every time, and then he asks me when’s the last time I dusted my apartment." She picked Bee up and settled him in her lap. "And even if it doesn't work... it sorta feels like I hafta try. Not just for Mista Steel, either. Nobody ever talks to Mista Ransom, not even to ask _why_. It just don't feel right."

Rita talks herself into it. Bee was pretty sure she would when the rambling had more excuses for why she should than why she shouldn't - signs and streams and doing what's right. If Bee has to guess the real reason, though, he thinks she probably just wants answers. 

She's right that no one ever talks to Ransom, but more than that no one ever talks about _any_ of it. Bee doesn't know why Juno was on the Dark Matters ship, the technicalities of how he was _removed_ from the Dark Matters ship, the horrible thing that had earned Ransom such a long time locked up - Bee doesn't know anything about Juno at all except the pieces and parts that Ransom and Rita have managed to share. Juno's not forgotten, he's just a hole ripped into the middle of everything that everyone has learned to operate around. Ignoring the empty space has, shockingly, done little to repair the damage.

So maybe it's not their best plan, sneaking down to the brig late at night with a key in one of Rita's hands and Bee in the other, with the understanding that getting caught could break a fragile and important trust. It's an awful plan, and the programming spent most of the day calculating different measures of how likely they are to fail and to what catastrophic degree. It is a plan, though, and even when the way is uncertain, the best path is forward.

(Come up with that all by yourself, the programming asks. Bee doesn't deign to respond, and does not admit that he isn't sure.)

At first, Ransom doesn't sound alarmed by their approach; he's tired and looks it, but when he turns to the bottom of the stairs there's a hint of a smile. That's probably Bee's fault, and that's probably who Ransom is expecting to see. Rita's presence is clearly a shock. He scrambles to his feet and, moments too late to recover his dignity, he tries to pretend a casual air.

Rita pretends nothing - she's wound as tight as a screw fit to crack its casing, Bee can feel it in the tension of the arm that's around him, and before the man in the cage can say something unconvincingly casual she talks over him. "You listen here Mista Ransom! I'm here on _important, official business_ and there's gonna be no nonsense on my watch, you got it?"

She pauses for him to respond. Ransom asks, "Isn't it a little late for 'official business'?"

"You're on thin ice, Mista Thief!" She slips the key into her pocket - some kind of chip, not at all what Bee expected a key to look like - and thrusts Bee out in front of her with both hands. "Keep sassin' me or try anything funny, and you'll get a taste of my little friend. He's Dark Matters tech, and you won't like finding out what he can do to you!" Bee beeps. He guesses it sounds threatening enough, for a beep.

"Ah," Ransom says. "Hello, Bee." Bee beeps a greeting.

"Bee? His name is Pancake!" Rita realizes a moment too late that she's trying to be threatening. "You two know each other?"

Bee makes a microwave _ding_ at the same time Ransom says yes.

Rita groans. "There goes my _whole plan_." She turns Bee towards her. "And you, why didn't you say anything?" Bee gives his best approximation of a shrug; he had not been filled in on the "make threats" part of the plan.

"If you don't mind me asking," Ransom interrupts, and Rita does her best to scowl even though her heart's not really in it anymore, "What exactly did you come down here to do? I haven't seen you since -"

He stops abruptly, as if someone had reached out and cut off the connection to his lungs. "Since," and there it is again - no one actually talking about anything, just carefully creeping around it.

Rita sighs and sits dejectedly on the bottom step, Bee in her lap. "I thought that, if I could make _sure_ you weren't gonna run, or hurt anybody, or whatever it is they keep waiting for you to do... maybe. Maybe you could go see him. In case that's... what he wants."

It's so quiet in the small, metal room. Bee swivels his eye to peek and see how Ransom feels about all of this, and the expression on his face is. He searches his limited database of experience, but all Bee can come up with is the vague impression of closed doors. An odd choice for a metaphor, since Ransom's face shows everything he's feeling, but Bee reminds himself that machines aren't meant to be good at feelings.

"You would let me see him?" Not quite hopeful, but very close. And Rita, who is observant too, notices.

"You'd have to promise me that you'd come right back here, no fighting. And no telling anyone, either."

He agrees like a drowning man offered a boat, and true to his word, he allows himself to be fitted in a loose set of shackles and led upstairs. At first he just stands by the bed, staring, looking like he's afraid to touch; when he sees the plush on the bed next to Juno, though, he collapses into the chair and reaches for one of Juno's hands.

"Still sleeping, darling?" Bee's only a few steps away, still held by Rita, and he can barely hear him. "I've missed you. There are... so many things I've wanted to tell you."

"We can't wake him up," Rita tells him after long minutes of just watching. Her voice is almost just as soft. "He's okay, just..."

Ransom doesn't turn to look at her, but his mouth hardens into an even line. "I am so sorry, Juno. Whatever it is I need to do, however I can take this back - just tell me. Please, won't you just _tell_ me?"

There's no miracle. Juno doesn't turn his face into Ransom's touch when he reaches out to cup his cheek, doesn't open his eyes when Ransom brushes a kiss against his forehead before Rita leads him back down to the cell. There are just three broken people and one broken machine, looking for pieces to put back together much too late to fix some unspoken thing between them.

Bee is the last one to wander to bed, feeling restless in the early morning hours even though he knows - and his programming reminds him, insistently - that he needs time to recharge. He catches Buddy in the doorway of the infirmary, or she catches him; either way, he freezes in his tracks, mind suddenly full of unasked for calculations about how likely he, Rita, and Ransom are to find themselves abandoned on the next available planet.

But Buddy doesn't look angry. She smiles, puts a finger to her lips in a universal sign for keeping secrets, and then looks back at the bed. "He looks at Juno the same as he always has." The words aren't aimed at anyone in particular, it seems, just thoughts said aloud. "Good to know that I was right about something." Eventually, she wanders off to bed.

Bee continues wandering the halls, filled with too much of something to let him sleep.

* * *

Do you think we feel, he asks himself.

The programming doesn't think so.

Then what is this, he demands. What _is_ this if it isn't a feeling? Explain it to me. Make me understand.

The programming doesn't know.

Sometimes it feels like burning, or being put back together, or flying, he says. There's no reason for it. There's no purpose to it, except that it's there and it's there so much, and I can't ignore it. Every day, when they look at me, when they talk to me... If you don't know what it is, how are you so sure what it's not?

The programming doesn't have an answer.

Maybe, it finally concedes.

* * *

Seeing someone treat Juno softly crumbles whatever hardness was in Rita's heart; the hurt is still there, plain on her face when she lets it show, but there are no more threats or even warnings when she trots down the stairs to the brig several more times. Bee thinks they've found some kind of understanding, and that's just as well - if they can't fix the big things, they might as well work on mending the little ones. He thinks both of them are sleeping better, at least.

It takes a few more visits, a few more very quiet nights of watching Ransom watch Juno and try to find the right words, before he starts talking to Rita and Bee while he sits by the bed. He asks about the ship, the crew. He asks about Rita's day. And finally, he says: "This is my fault."

"You already said that, Mista Ransom." Rita is drooping in another chair, dragged over a while before and set a little apart. Bee doesn't recall any such conversation, so it must have happened before he was brought onboard. "Said that a lot, actually."

Ransom is holding Juno's hand, but it looks like he's having a hard time looking at Juno's face. He's not looking at anyone, exactly, not for long - his gaze flickers to Rita, then to Bee, and back to Juno. He sighs. "He wouldn't even have been awake, if not for me. Certainly wouldn't have been in the garage." Ransom finally settles on the hand he's holding, staring down and rubbing a thumb gently back and forth across the knuckles. "I was... in trouble. Somehow, I convinced myself I could get out of it, on my own - minimal damage on all sides, a clean break, a..." 

He clears his throat.

"Stupid of me, really, to think that Juno Steel - the detective who put me in handcuffs hours after we first met - to think he wouldn't notice something wrong. He saw right through me, as he always seems to - was waiting for me on the hood of the Ruby 7, actually.” He laughed, fondness mixing in with ache. “He told me we were even, and we’d done enough running away from each other for one lifetime.”

“Running away?” From the way Ransom’s attention snaps to her, he hadn’t been expecting an interruption. Bee hadn’t, either. Rita has her thinking face on, scrunched slightly in concentration. “But you weren’t... you called them. You called the Dark Matters people, and they showed up, and then a whole lotta bad stuff happened real fast.”

Ransom is very still. “Why would I _call_ them.”

“To pay those debts. You told us that, had all that tech we stole in a bag ready to go.”

“I don’t owe Dark Matters _anything_.” He sounds calm, but dangerously so. Bee beeps softly, and Ransom’s attention shifts for just a second - and it’s enough. A little tension leaks out of him. “I have debts to pay, and to dangerous people, but I would never have called them to the ship. I would never have called them _here_. I was going to take the Ruby and meet them.”

“And Mista Steel wanted to stop you.”

“He wanted me to wait. To call a family meeting in the morning. He had it all figured out and had been waiting for me to tell him the truth, of course - he was furious that I thought of going alone.”

Rita looks upset; Bee can’t tell if she’s going to cry or yell. “You told us it was your fault. Over and over, Mista Ransom. That the whole thing was _your fault_.”

Ransom is squeezing Juno’s hand - sometimes a person just needs a hand to hold even if it isn’t holding back, a bit of human wisdom Bee picked up from his time on the Carte Blanche. “He was there to stop me. He was distracted, and an agent _shot him in the back_.”

Rita springs to her feet. The chair makes a loud screech of protest against the metal floor behind her, and Ransom and Bee both startle at the sudden noise. “That makes it _your_ fault?” Oh, and she sounds _angry_. “What if he’d gotten shot ‘cause he was protecting me, would it be my fault then?” Ransom opens his mouth to answer, but she doesn’t give him the chance. “I didn’t do a security check, did you know that? The one night I figured, it’s probably fine - it’s always fine and we’re in the middle ‘a space, who’s gonna try and get in all the way out here? And you know what _happened_ Mista Ransom, the one night I didn’t make sure the security was working right?” The tears had broken free, were streaming down her face. “Mista Steel got shot and scooped up and taken away, and none of us knew why except you - except you, _we thought_. So how come I’m not in the brig with you, huh?”

“I-“

"How about the rest of us, Mista Ransom? Everyone feels guilty. Miss Vespa keeps tearing her hair out 'cause she can't get him to wake up, and Jet's been working on more sensors for the Ruby, and Captain A, she's in her room all the time tryin' to figure out how any of it happened. So how come you gotta take the blame, since we're all feeling it anyway?"

Ransom looks uncertain; something resolute in his expression is starting to crack. "I was going to betray all of you, steal from you -"

"Sounds to me like someone stopped you from doing that, though. Sounds to me, if you don't mind me sayin' - and I'm gonna say it anyway - like you got a chance to do things different now. You ain't gonna make anything better sittin' in a cell when you don't need to be, Mista Ransom." Rita pauses to take a few quick, unsteady breaths. "And I'll tell you somethin' else - we're down too many family members with both of you gone like this. If we're all gonna carry this anyway, we can use as much help as we can get."

The room is quiet, except for the uneven breath of two people either trying hard not to cry or to stop crying. Feelings seem like a hard thing to have; Bee wonders if they're worth it. The programming shrugs, pointing out that they'll have the chance to find out - for better or for worse. 

"And you would... want my help?" He sounds doubtful. "Association with me comes with risks. You might be better off at arms' length."

Rita's voice is flat and unimpressed. "Mista Ransom, do you _know_ how many dangerous people I met through Mista Steel? A lot." And then, her voice is much softer. "And he was right, you know. You don't gotta do this alone."

Ransom isn't looking at any of them again, staring at the floor and somewhere miles away. He's crying, so softly that it takes a minute for Bee or Rita to notice. When she does, though, she picks up her chair, walks it over, and puts it right next to his. Before he can ask - before he can even acknowledge how close she's gotten - she grabs his other hand in a tight, steadying hold. Ransom cries harder, and Bee imagines the sobs as every awful thing he curled around and clutched to him that first night Bee found him in the cage - the guilt and doubt and loneliness - wrung out of him so the wound can start to heal.

* * *

The next family meeting sees the table almost full. All eyes are on Ransom, in fresh clothes and with no shackles around his wrists; he seems taller, even sitting down - like his containment had diminished him somehow. And he looks so incredibly nervous.

He talks about the debts, and the reason for them, and his plan to pay them off. He tells them what happened in the garage, about finding Juno waiting and an argument and a blaster in the back before Ransom had time to warn him. The crew knew the rest, of course - confusion and miscommunication and hurt in the mad scramble to go after Juno.

Buddy hummed thoughtfully. "So. In debt, but not to Dark Matters. Betrayal, but not at the cost of the crew. It's almost a little anticlimactic, darling. Are you sure you don't have any other sordid secrets to share?" Her face is carefully neutral for a long moment, impossible to tell what she makes of the news. The smile she finally allows it to slip through is small, but it's undeniably present. "So where does that leave us?"

Ransom takes a steadying breath. Rita smiles at him from across the table, encouraging. "I was hoping... that I might ask for your help. To find another solution to my debt."

It's Vespa who speaks up before anyone else has the chance to. "That's rich. Sounds like a lot of trouble for someone who was ready to stab us in the back. How are we supposed to trust you after that?"

"If your trust isn't something you can give, I won't ask for it. I know it can only be earned." There's a mug on the table in front of him, silently placed there by Jet, and he clings to it like a lifeline. "But I trust all of you, and I'm prepared to prove it." He looks up at the captain, and though she doesn't move something in her face shifts to sharper attention. "I do have one more sordid secret to share, as it happens."

"Do tell," Buddy murmurs. No one else interrupts.

Bee doesn't know how he knows, but it's this moment that might break Peter Ransom. He looks alone and untethered, sitting at the far side of the table in plain sleep clothes, no makeup, no more defenses from what's coming than the mug in his hands and his own refusal to speak.

This could be the moment where he destroys whatever chance he has at trying something new.

It's not so much a decision as an inevitability. Bee stands up from his spot in front of Rita and clicks across the table. He's more sure-footed now than when he arrived, even though the surface of the table is slick and everyone is looking at him. He settles down next to Ransom's arm and untucks one leg to rest it gently against a sleeve. Sometimes a person just needs a hand to hold - even if the one doing the holding doesn't have any hands.

He smiles, and something uncertain seems to settle. With one more fortifying breath, Ransom turns to the people he has decided to trust. "My name is Peter Nureyev."

* * *

He might never reach the usability intended upon his creation, but Bee has improved. He clicks carefully and securely across smooth, tiled halls. The programming feeds him blueprints without him having to ask, the spot that’s most likely the server room highlighted and impossible to miss. He hasn’t seen anyone since slipping out of Nureyev’s pocket - and almost taking a handful of change, a comb, and two cotton balls with him - but it’s only a matter of time before he starts running into guards, with where he’s going. That’s fine; he might have to wait a little while, but there’s a distraction coming that’s guaranteed to pull the attention of the entire building. 

If the original purpose of what’s about to happen isn’t “distraction,” then never let it be said that Bee is not resourceful.

The Hopewell Company is a family-owned business, in the sense that the Hopewells call their criminal empire a “family.” It’s a large, sprawling operation, spanning across the black market in a number of lucrative businesses. One of it’s bigger outfits is a multilevel high rise on one of Saturn’s moons, ostentatious, obvious, and with the best security system this side of the solar system. 

The “debt collection” portion of the Hopewell empire is not located in a high rise on Saturn. The building looks more like an abandoned office that was a couple of centuries out of date even in its prime. The wallpaper is peeling, the tile is cracked, and the security would be laughable if the place didn’t house some of the company’s most dangerous people. To those who don’t know the Hopewells, it doesn’t seem worth the effort to break in; to those who do, it doesn’t seem worth the effort for different reasons. That’s why they keep their records on-site, entirely offline and unreachable unless someone is standing right in front of them - it’s all or nothing.

All or nothing. If the idea intimidates him, he doesn’t let it take root. He’s here now. Bee carries on.

_When Peter Nureyev shared his name, something in the Carte Blanche woke up._

_Not Juno - that would be a little much to hope for, with no indication of any change in his condition - but everyone else was... more present, suddenly. Like muted tones that had burst into vibrant technicolor, and Bee observed the change with interest._

_(Could be the adrenaline, the programming commented.)_

_(Could be they're just happy to have him back, Bee replied.)_

_Whether they meant to or not, they’d missed him. There were two holes punctured in the heart of the ship, when Juno was gone and they thought Nureyev was the reason. Bee couldn’t tell if it was a surprise to any of them or if they already knew; they did an excellent job of pretending at “business as usual” to someone who didn’t know better._

_Bee knew better. He saw the way Nureyev was pulled back into the fold, by awkward starts and stilted offers. Jet asked for a taste-test, and Rita dragged him down on the couch for a stream when it seemed like he would work through the night. Vespa hauled a more comfortable chair into the medbay when she caught him asleep there, and Buddy asked him questions about the plans drawn out on the table._

_They all called him by his name. If Nureyev noticed any part of the change, it was that._

_At first it startled him, an instant of fear until he remembered the secret was already out. It was fascinating to watch the way that reaction transformed from unease, to cautious acceptance, to something…_

_(Hopeful, the programming, which was getting better at feelings, suggested.)_

_(Hopeful, Bee agreed. It looks good on him.)_

_It was an infectious feeling, all of it, and Bee wanted to be a part of it. He followed them around more, would have been inconveniently underfoot if not for being constantly scooped up into arms and placed on the table where the planning was happening, or the counter where food was being prepared, or the edge of Juno’s bed during a visit. Whatever he’d been looking for at the beginning, he must have found it._

_But he had limits. He couldn’t say Nureyev’s name._

_What he could do instead, was erase it._

The alarm goes off and Bee tucks himself into a shadowed corner and into himself while he waits for the vibration of pounding footsteps to stop. The timing is just right - of course it is, the programming preens, that's what comes of strategic planning and careful, accurate calculation - and the room he's here to investigate is left alone, door standing open.

The room is just what they hoped it would be: the server room. There are several towering computers on a table, interconnected by a mess of wires and hanging on with electrical tape and a prayer. The technology is near-ancient, perhaps its only redeeming feature, as it’s far too out of date to support any modern connectivity; Rita wouldn’t be able to access the files without being in the room. If Rita couldn’t do it, no one could - law enforcement, rival business, thieves looking for blackmail - a deliberate security measure that skirted disaster by an inch, since no one could fix technology this old, either.

Bee doesn’t need to trash the computers, though; one file, one name, and then back to the ship before anyone notices he’s gone. He’s not here to draw attention to himself, he’s here to eliminate a margin of error if the crew takes too long with upper management, or someone remembers the weak point.

In and out. Nothing could be simpler. 

_“So,” Buddy said to her family, standing over the kitchen table with plans already half drawn. “The Hopewells. A nasty group of people - not my preferred company.”_

_“I suppose you could always toss me to them and make a run for it,” Nureyev said, somewhere between an attempt at levity and a genuine offer. He wilted just a little under the silence._

_“I think not.” She fixed Nureyev with a look - not angry, but intense, clearly demanding his attention for what she was about to say. “You may not agree with me, but this family cannot afford to lose you, Pete.” He looked down at the table, face unreadable. Buddy cleared her throat. “And make no mistake - if they catch you, that will not be the end of it. They will find ways to keep you in debt, bleed you dry until there’s nothing more they can wring from you - that’s their business model.”_

_What she didn’t say was that it never would have worked; his plan of running off with the stolen items would have ended with him never coming back, or being sent back as an even greater threat if his debt collectors decided there was more profit to be had from the Carte Blanche. This was not a game he could win, or a consequence he could outrun. This was not something he could fix on his own._

_Nureyev looked as if he was about to say something, and let it go with a sigh. “It sounds as if you know that from experience,” he settled on instead._

_“Rumors, mostly. The Hopewells like to play at being a family, but there’s something they’re well known for in certain circles - they absolutely despise each other. The company is fractured into highly-competitive divisions, and they guard their secrets closely. Which means I don’t have any proof to back up what I’m telling you… but which also means that, should someone ‘remove’ the key players of a division, that information would not be held anywhere else. Nor would that individual expect any retaliation from the rest of the Hopewell Company.” Her tone was significant, and suggestive._

_“That’s a big mess for the sake of one thief, don’t you think?” His smile was bitter._

_Buddy seemed entirely unconcerned. “You’re right, darling, it’s an awfully big mess you’ve gotten yourself into and it will be a bigger one to clean up. Not to mention entirely a drain on resources, since there’s no chance of making a profit with any of this. And so, I am offering every member of this family the chance to walk away from this venture, effective immediately. Anyone unwilling to participate may leave the meeting now.”_

_Nureyev looked up, startled, suddenly vulnerable, as if the only expectation he could have was that the people around him would get up and leave. Buddy gave them a minute, then two, watching his face all the while. No one at the table moved. All of them met Nureyev’s eyes when he looked at them._

_He paused a little on Vespa, who shrugged. “No one deserves a collar and a leash, thief. I don’t know if you haven’t caught on yet or something, but the fact that you’re still_ here _right now means you’re still a part of this.” She grinned, and it was as sharp as ever, as_ threatening _as ever. “Welcome to the Aurinko crime family, Nureyev. You’re stuck with us, now.”_

_Nureyev started to speak. Stopped. Cleared his throat and tried again. “Thank you. I will do my best to deserve this.”_

_And with that, Buddy leaned in with an eager grin. “So glad we have that sorted, darling. Now, we have work to do.”_

_Bee watched all of the plans form from his place atop the table, or occasionally a shoulder when the extra space was needed. He was still here, too. He was still a part of this, and that thought echoed as he watched the individual parts of his family form a cohesive, capable whole. Like a machine, but better than most because they didn’t do it under direction or towards a purpose other than what they'd decided was important to them. They made their own directive._

_(So do you, the programming said eventually, almost reluctantly. Don't you remember that? Directive 4: the machine does what it wants.)_

_(You can guess what I want, Bee answered. You see it too, don’t you - the hole in the plan.)_

_(Rita will have to be escorted to the server room after the primary objective is satisfied. The primary objective only targets the leaders of division. A survivor would have adequate time to copy some of the data, resulting in a non-zero chance that the targeted data could be leaked.)_

_(And then it starts all over again. We are a part of this family now, aren’t we?)_

_(We are.)_

_(Then we help. Directive 4.)_

_(The programming nodded, and started quietly scanning blueprints.)_

When there isn’t a clear way to climb to the table, Bee sets subtlety aside and jams a leg into the wall, and then another. The wood of the walls is difficult, but it has more give than metal, and eventually he gouges enough footholds to drag himself onto the tabletop. 

The computers are inexplicable; it doesn’t help that they’re decades out of date at best, and probably worse than that. Even the programming gives them a skeptical first glance; there might be a handful of people familiar enough with the technology to attempt hacking it, another measure of security. Fortunately, he doesn’t need subtlety here, either - Bee walks up to one of the servers and jams one of his legs right through the side. 

(You could have tapped it, the programming grumbles.) 

(And what’s the fun in that, he returns, as if the programming were not just as satisfied at the crumpling of metal.)

A stream of information floods the shared space between them: names, numbers that measure out the value of a life against the years that value is predicted to be viable, excuses in financial terms to wring a life dry in service.

Bee looks for the name that was given to him like a gift, like a sign of trust.

_“I’m trusting you with this,” Rita told him before she holed herself up in the ship’s control room. The rest of the family were gearing up and going over last-minute plans in the kitchen; soon the halls would be empty and waiting._

_Rita and Bee were in the medbay. He was perched on the edge of the bed, where she’d placed him, and she was looking at him with so much of that trust. Juno slept on, unaware._

_“I talked to everybody and we’d all feel better if somebody was watchin’ him, you know? I’ll be right down the hall, and probably nothin’s gonna happen because it probably woulda happened already, but.” She glanced up at Juno before looking back at Bee. “We’d just feel better, is all.” Rita smiled and gave him a little pat. “Thanks, Bee.”_

_He watched her leave. And then he turned and looked at Juno Steel._

_Bee didn’t know Juno. They’d never spoken; he’d never gotten a chance to observe the kind of person Juno is. Bee was... uniquely unqualified to predict what Juno would want in this situation. All he had were stories._

_But they were stories from people who love him, and in them he didn’t want those people to be alone. Bee didn’t need to know more than that. He walked up closer to Juno - had the small, silly thought that he’d never been this close to him before - and tapped him gently on the hand. Juno didn’t move. Bee hoped he could forgive being left alone one more time, and then he hopped down from the bed and towards the kitchen._

There are names, and names, and names. There are so many people. One is sixteen, the next is nineteen. One is a mother, with children listed as potential collateral. One has been caught in this net for decades, only tied down deeper with every passing day.

(We aren’t here for them, the programming says.) 

But there is a feeling behind the words, growing, and Bee knows it. Bee feels it, too. Moral outrage.

(We could be here for them, Bee says. We could be here for all of them.)

There’s something rising in the collective space between them. A feeling, an idea, a reckless abandon - something.

(What do you think about causing a little chaos, Bee asks.)

(The programming doesn’t answer. But it does smile in smug satisfaction as it hands over a bit of code, carefully unwrapped from where it had been hidden. If the strings of information could be resolved into an image, it might look like a cartoon bomb with “Rita” written across it in sparkling glitter.)

For once, for just a moment, Bee and the programming are perfectly aligned in thought.

Bee doesn’t know anything about technology, but Bee knows how to fling a bomb. He has one final glimpse of a name - Nureyev - before the virus explodes, consuming information faster even than it flipped through his mind. The servers, all of them, start whining and smoking under the strain, but Bee doesn’t move. He has to be sure. He’ll give the virus as long as he can to decimate the last thread tying thousands to debt - even if the licking flames of it get close, even if it feels like it’s burning away something _in him_ -

Bee is made of stern stuff. The force crushes him from behind, though, is sterner.

There is a flash of light, a spark of stray electricity that blinds him for a moment. His right side is crumpled, flattened - he can’t feel those half of his legs, they won’t respond, and the other half are scrambling madly to drag him towards the edge of the table and away from whatever just happened almost without command. The programming is screeching, the sound of thoughtless audio feedback rattling through his mind with panic. More sparks of electricity flash at the end of disconnected wires, scorching the circuitry with nowhere else to go.

Another slamming _force_ and his flattened half is distended. He hasn’t even had time to look behind him and see what’s doing this, or maybe he just can’t string thoughts together quickly enough to realize he can. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters besides getting _away_.

The programming can’t help the calculations it runs; it’s doing what it always does, fills uncertainty with numbers and predictions. The programming knows how many seconds passed between the first and second blow. The programming knows when the next blow should come, and so Bee does too, and Bee braces for an ending.

It doesn’t come. There are sounds behind him that he doesn’t fully register. A struggle, the programming predicts, but it’s starting to sound fainter, the syllables dragging strangely.

Bee is in the air, gently scooped up, and -

Someone is saying his name, it catches and drags in strange ways, he thinks it’s his name, he’s almost sure, and -

Bouncing, fast footsteps on a tile floor, and it jars the broken pieces of him in something that _can’t_ be pain but he can _feel every broken part of him, the rubbing of splintered pieces, the leg only just still attached_ -

_He was carried before, carried quickly in arms he trusted_ -

More voices, more voices so loud so much, and that isn’t his name is it, is it, and -

Numbers and names and numbers and names and all of them on fire, and -

_He’s not in pain but he should be, and_ -

_Why isn’t he in pain_ -

_He was shot in the back, why doesn’t it h u r t_ -

“Bee?”

The voice wakes him up. There’s a strange moment of dizziness, a strange moment of confusion as the world and his place in it swings in and out of shape. He’s on a table. Rita is above him, looking down on him, and concentrating closely on something. Information streams across a screen next to them rapidly.

“Don’t think he’s all here yet, Mista Nureyev. Got a nasty shock to the system, with the virus and the getting all smashed up.”

There’s the slight squeak of a chair and a sigh. “That’s fair. The damned goon had a _bat_ if you can believe it.” He sounds nervous, as if he’s talking mostly to fill the silence.

Rita is repairing something. She glances at the screen, and away, and then back quickly. Her face scrunches up a little while her eyes dart across the words. “Uh, yeah. Lucky thing you found him when you did.”

“Luckier that you noticed he was gone. Not that he really needed any help… until the bat.” There’s a long, heavy silence - the only interruption is the slight hiss of one of Rita’s tools and an occasional tap to highlight information on the screen. They’re in the medbay, he realizes. Strange place for a repair. “I had a foolish thought, when we found him.”

“Oh yeah?” She sounds distracted, pulling up another screen of complicated code. 

“That it seemed like something Juno would do.”

That finally distracts Rita from her work for a moment; she looks over her shoulder, giving Nureyev real attention, but the sound of her voice is drowned out by a different voice in his head. _File: patient JUNO STEEL located. Retrieving relevant records. Records: CLASSIFIED. Classification protocol: INTERRUPTED_.

Rita’s voice filters back in as she turns back around. “ - and you know, there’s all kinds of information in here I didn’t know Bee even _knew_ \- maybe he didn’t, maybe it was _top secret_ stuff, maybe that virus didn’t damage him but -“ The sight of what’s on display on the screen stops her. For a long moment, Rita is speechless.

He doesn’t wait for her to understand. He stands up, wobbly as ever, and stumbles in the direction of the bed. He’s on the cusp of realization, but there’s just not enough _room_ as he is now. There is a key, and there is a door.

Fortunately, this time, the table is higher than the bed. He falls onto it, struggles back upright. He climbs on top of the person on the bed, and there he rests. A chip activates in response to proximity - the key to a door, which opens something in a small machine.

(Bee? the programming asks)

(That’s not my name, he answers. But you can keep it, if you want.)

* * *

He feels warm, when he wakes up.

Warm and achy and way too tired for how long he’s been sleeping. He’s got a headache coming on, too, though it’s closer to the feeling of stretching after spending too long folded up somewhere cramped. His mind feels bigger. No, his head feels like it fits the amount of mind that’s in it… and then he needs to stop thinking about that, or he really will get a headache.

There’s no voice in his head, either. It’s quieter, the way it should be - it was never there in _his_ head, anyway. That isn’t how it works.

The first thing Juno sees when he opens his eyes is a machine. It’s small and flat - not as flat as a few hours ago, thankfully - all made up of chrome plating. It’s single, blue eye stares up at him, and he smiles. “Hi, Bee,” he rasps out. He traces a rough line of welding - not quite all put together again yet, and that’s probably Juno’s fault. “Looking a little rough, still. Don’t worry, Rita will patch you up. She’s good at that, but I guess you already know.” The machine beeps up at him.

There’s a soft hiccup, and Juno commits himself to the monumental task of turning his head. Rita’s sitting next to him, in front of a table scattered with small, delicate parts. She looks shell-shocked, and for a moment he thinks she won’t be able to speak until it comes tumbling out of her. “You were here the whole time?” She shakes her head before he can answer. “I mean yeah, I know you’ve been _laying_ here and all that, but I mean…” She doesn’t say what she means; she can’t, because the tears that have been quietly running down her face overcome her in a sudden, shaking sob. Juno smiles and opens an arm - another monumental effort, he’s going to be _paying_ for this weird… nap thing - and Rita doesn’t hesitate to lean into him. 

And there’s someone else in the room, he remembers, and just as he’s looking up -

“Juno?”

\- a voice he’s missed. Or, a voice he’s missed knowing. It’s the kind of sentimental thought he’ll regret later, but he remembers late nights on the other side of a cell, listening to stories, and he thinks he’d seek that voice out in any life.

If Rita looked shocked, Nureyev looks… shattered. He’s standing, the chair fallen to the floor behind him, and as he moves closer to the bed the pieces of him come back together into something amazed, pained, _healed_.

Juno doesn’t even have to hold out his hand; Nureyev takes it by habit, and when Juno squeezes back it wrings out a wet laugh out of Nureyev. He doesn’t sob like Rita, but the tears come down faster than he can wipe them away, and he finally stops trying, using that hand to hold Juno’s face instead.

“Just like you,” he whispers eventually. “It’s _just like you_ to find me when I need you. It’s just like you to go _running into danger_ for my sake, you foolish, wonderful lady. What would I do without you?”

“Get locked up, seems like,” Juno says, and it draws out another helpless laugh.

The medbay is busy for hours. Vespa shoos the two of them off of Juno and runs every exam she can think of. Part of Juno uncharitably thinks it’s revenge for taking up a bed so long - but he knows better. It’s an apology for not fixing it sooner.

Jet _looms_. Suddenly he’s just _there_ next to the bed, telling Juno he’s glad he is okay, they were all very concerned, and then refusing to move. Juno swears he sees tears in the big guy’s eyes, but they’re gone when he takes a second glance. Vespa accepts his presence for the obstacle it is, dodging around him while trying to reach equipment.

Buddy doesn’t get in the way; she lingers in the doorway, watching. When Juno spots her, he waves. She leans against the doorway while she returns it, something iron in her backbone that had been holding her up finally able to melt away.

And Bee - the new Bee, who Juno will have a chance to meet properly, soon - stays just where they are, curled up on top of Juno.

It’s late by the time it’s quiet again. The stream Rita had on for them has long since ended, and Rita is curled up next to Juno again, asleep. Nureyev would be laying next to him, too, if there was any more room on the bed - as it is, he has his head laying next to Juno’s on the pillow while he weaves their fingers together and apart, over and over.

“You can sleep if you need to, dear. I won’t hold it against you.”

“Don’t think I’ll want to sleep for a while.” And then, with perfect timing, he yawns while Nureyev laughs quietly at his expense. He doesn’t say that he remembers waking up cold and uncertain, that it could happen again - that it would be just his luck for Juno to lower his guard, sleep, and lose everything all over. He doesn’t say it. He tries not to think it.

They’re quiet for a long time, and Juno’s body is betraying him - amazing that he can still find it in him to be tired - when Nureyev asks a question he almost can’t hear. “What was it like?”

“The robot thing?” Juno considers his answer. “Weird. There wasn’t enough… room. So it was me, but not - not all of me.”

“Did it… hurt?”

“No nerves, so no.”

“Juno.”

He sighs. “Just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Who builds a broken machine, right?” Nureyev starts to lift his head, looking concerned, and Juno leans over and wipes that away with a kiss. “It’s over now. And I’m fine.”

Nureyev leans back down again. “I missed you.”

Juno smiles - he can do that now, so easily, and it’s going to take a while for the novelty of that to wear off. “I was never that far away.”

Juno thinks Nureyev dozes for a while. He doesn’t mind, running a gentle hand through Nureyev’s hair, reveling in the ability to see and think and _feel_ the way he should. Something anxious in him steadies. He can talk. He can feel the weight of Nureyev and Rita next to him, the warmth coming from them, the scratch of the sheets. Bee is still resting on his chest, and that pressure makes all of it feel real the way nothing else probably could. He’s _here_.

When Nureyev wakes up again, much later - or much earlier, considering the time - he catches Juno looking. “Why ‘Bee’?”

“Hm?”

“The name - you liked Bee the best.” He yawns. “I always wondered why that was. Perhaps because you like _me_ best?”

Juno grins. “Don’t let Rita hear you say that.”

There are reasons he could give - that it was the first time Nureyev told him a story about them, that it was the name of something that shouldn’t exist and that was accurate enough, that one of his other options was _pancake_... 

Juno pulls his hand away from Nureyev for just a moment, just to trace the line of uneven metal along the machine. It would be gone when Rita had a chance to finish her work, no worse for wear for all that Juno put them both through - besides the lasting, corrupting influence of sharing a very tiny space with Juno Steel for an extended amount of time. He couldn’t bring himself to regret that one. 

He settles on a reason that feels right, even though he couldn’t have remembered at the time. “Mick calls me ‘Jay.’ He used to call Benten ‘Bea.’ Just next to right, I guess.”

“What are the chances,” Nureyev asks quietly, wonderingly.

The truth is, it all seems so damn unlikely. There’s an impossible piece of technology resting on him and something just as impossible in the fact that he’s here at all. But even without a running calculation of numbers and statistics at the back of his mind, tonight, Juno decides he likes his chances - unlikely as they are.

He wants to say something about that, something about this profound feeling in the low light and late hour, but when he opens his mouth all that comes out is a yawn. There’s a gentle brush of lips against his forehead, and a lovely, familiar voice whispering in his ear. “Go to sleep, darling. This will all still be here when you wake up.”

And Juno believes him. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I could draw - I have such a clear picture of what “Bee” looks like in my mind.
> 
> (Also, because I didn’t get to address it directly in the fic and I’m worried it’s a little vague - the key and door towards the end is referring to the chip broadcasting “Juno” into the bot, which couldn’t be scanned because it hid itself and the records of it were hidden from “Bee”)


End file.
